Postcards to Gallifrey
by Lady Rhiannon
Summary: AU. The TARDIS is broken no more time travel, and no offplanet travel until he can get the parts he needs. And so the Doctor and Rose live out their bohemian lifestyle in a whole new way.  Complete
1. Part One: Zakynthos, Greece

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who nor its affliated characters

She says, offhand, that at least the TARDIS got stuck in her own century. And then she remembers that it doesn't matter anymore. Not really. She chose to stay with him, and not go with her mother and Mickey into that other universe where the man who would be her father was still alive. Rose has been traveling with him since, and he hasn't let her go.

Of course, they've picked up strays and left them off again, when they were ready to go. But Rose stays. And the funny thing, the Doctor notices years later, is that she doesn't look like it has been years. He puzzles over it, and runs some tests, which earn him a smack or two. But he eventually figures it out; The Time Vortex changed her when she took it into herself; it made her into the Goddess of Time; she is his equal.

On the day the TARDIS is damaged, and Rose gets hurt. It's the same cause, actually. The Doctor has made enemies more powerful than he and with more convenient access to their repair yards. Rose is hurt worse than the TARDIS, and for a while he's so concerned with her that he doesn't notice how bad the damage to his ship, his home, is.

Rose heals, it turns out. He wonders if, when something does manage to kill her, she won't simply regenerate. It's starting to seem likely.

His ship, however, can't regenerate the parts she needs. He babbles on at Rose, back on her feet within a day, about how bad it is as he works away wedged under the console, trying to cobble together something that will work. In the end, he does the best that he can.

No more time travel, it turns out. Not until he can figure out a better solution to the parts problem. Barely works for traveling through space either. They find this out the hard way when he takes her to Barcelona and they step out in Spain. And so, for a couple hundred years, they settle for space. One city, and then another, jumping when the neighbors get suspicious, when the country goes to war, when they have grown attached.

They love each place, just as they love each and every traveler that they have picked up over these long years.

These are their loves songs to these places.

Rose loves to run down the hill, like a little girl. The house, perched on its cliff high above the ocean, is up a steep, winding road from the town. When Rose walks down to the market, a basket in her arms, she will sometimes, and only if absolutely no one is around to see, run down the hill, feeling as if she is, if only for a moment or two, flying.

At the market, the translated Greek has a tang to it, tasting, perhaps of salt air and long ages. It reminds her of how Greek sounded when translated from a younger version of itself. She haggles with the women in the market over vegetables, and rice, and freshly caught fish. Both parties always come away happy. By now all of the women at the market know her, and Rose knows them and their families as well.

Among all of these dark-haired people, Rose has let her hair go dark as well. The Doctor dresses more casually now, in a t-shirt sometimes even. She's made him take on a pseudonym, which she insisted be something other than John Smith. He now goes by Doctor John Tyler. It was just to annoy her, at first, but she's grown rather fond of it.

Taking the shopping back up the hill is more tiresome, and for the first few months, Rose would have to stop and rest several times on the way up. Now she can make the trip in one go, even if she does arrive back at the house a little sweaty and out of breath.

The tiny house is right on the cliff, on the edge of the Aegean Sea. They can look from the windows and right out across the water. At night, the other islands look as if they float on nothingness. She likes to lie awake at night, pressed to his side, and listen to him talk. He tells her of the 'Floating World' in Kyoto, where they once visited, so long ago. He tells her of the city in the clouds, which only he stopped from coming down. Then she makes up stories, of worlds, of places. He can always top her with the truth of what he's seen. She's waiting for the day that he runs out of things to tell her.

They've picked up a stray: A little, dark-eyed boy who can't be younger than about 12. His parents had both died, accidents, and he had been living with the family of his cousin, there in the town. When the Doctor and Rose had showed up, out of nowhere, all the children on the small island were curious. But only little Athos was curious enough, and with enough skill at shirking his duties, to go up and investigate the strange people living on the old abandoned house on the hill.

He crouched in the scrawny bushes in front of the house, waiting for a glimpse of human life while down in the town below his cousin tired of looking for him and went back to her mending. Rose spotted him right away when she went out, no matter how cleverly he thought he was hiding himself. She walked right up to the bush, a disarming smile on her face. But the little boy still didn't move. Finally she said, scaring him a little, "Well, are you gonna sit there all day, or are you going to come have a cup of tea?"

Warily, he accepted the offer, and thusly met Rose Tyler and Doctor John. Athos assumed they were married, and they didn't correct him, mostly because they too couldn't figure out exactly what they were. It was simplest to explain to the child that they were married. At the very least, Rose told the Doctor, it would cause the least scandal.

As soon as he met him, the boy seemed to be fascinated with the Doctor, and came sneaking up to the house at any chance he got. Soon, he was spending so much time up there that, one day while at market Athos' cousin simply asked Rose if she would like another housemate, up there on the hill. For a brief moment, she considered asking the Doctor first, but then figured he could deal with it, said yes, and carried a few of Athos' things up the hill with the rest of the shopping.

The Doctor warmed to the boy quite quickly. Rose thought it must be because the boy was bright, smart as a whip. Anything the Doctor or Rose taught him, he understood and could use. She taught him how to cook, to dance, to laugh. The Doctor taught him science, and math, and anything else the boy wished to learn. Athos loved it all, but took a shine to the discipline of geology. The islands of Greece were full of this record of the past, and it was clearly visible. But it grew to encompass more than just his own land; he wanted to explore, to find the other records of long lost worlds, and resurrect them, at least in his own mind.

Rose and the Doctor taught him to wander.


	2. Part Two: Bray, Ireland

Outside Dublin, Ireland seems to be nothing more than sheep and meadows. They end up on a small piece of land down the coast from Bray. Rose thinks that the Doctor's going to be bored with this place within a week, and she's sure that she will be. A week goes by, and then a month and when it's three months and counting, Rose realizes that this place, as she puts it, isn't so bad.

The nearest town is just fifteen minutes' walk away from their little old cottage, and the city of Dublin is a half hour by train. In order to make some sort of money for things like food, the Doctor decides to start a small medical practice, out there in the country. From somewhere in the infinite depths of the TARDIS' interior, he digs up one of the many diplomas that he's collected through his travels. Not much happens out here though; the worst is a bad case or two of the flu, and a few children's bones to reset.

He's just wandering, when he finds the place. He and Rose had only arrived a few days prior, and Rose was doing the domestic thing and setting up house, which the Doctor didn't care to have any part of. He only lives in the house for her sake, really. He's almost rather live in the TARDIS. But the damage is more than physical; her link to the Time Vortex has somehow been weakened; not cut off, but a trickle of power is all that's getting through. And he just doesn't have the parts. With so many of her non-essential systems shut down to keep from doing further damage, Rose argues that if they're going to have to do the coking and the cleaning and the shopping, and if there is a house that they can use for just a little while, why not move in? It's only for a few months, at the least, before the TARDIS has enough power to jump again.

Just down the road, is the local blacksmith. Walking down the road, he decides to investigate the sound. He finds, in the forge, a small, tough woman with close-cropped black hair and a love for horses and metal, nailing the last shoe onto the hoof of a lovely chestnut mare while the horse's owner waits by the fence, chatting with the farrier's husband. With a few deft taps, the last shoe is on, and she puts down the leg, looking up from her work to see the Doctor, standing in the doorway. She takes in his appearance with a raised eyebrow and says, in a brogue so thick he almost needs the translation software to understand, "You're going to get your pretty suit all dirty if you stay 'round here much longer."

Her next customer arrives, and she turns her attention back to her work. The Doctor stays and watches her work this time, taking in the rest of the workshop, with the various pieces of metalwork, some half-finished, tucked into out-of-the-way corners. It's all a bit fascinating to him. When she's finished shoeing this next horse, last of the day, she invites him in for a cup of tea, if he's going to hang around. He starts asking questions about her work and not just the practical things either. The bits and pieces she's got tucked away look far more decorative in nature than the horseshoes she just finished with.

She pulls one of them out from the shadows, showing him the working of it, how delicate it looks, when it's really quite strong. When her husband pulls them away from this, she finally introduces herself as Bridget and her husband as Connor. After a cup of tea, he goes back to Rose, keeping his thoughts to himself.

The Doctor goes back again, many times. Bridget finally gets fed up with him just standing around and offers to teach him a few things. He's excited at the chance to learn something new. So, for a few hours nearly every day, he vanishes. Rose notices, but he doesn't say anything and she, even though she's desperately curious, doesn't ask. She decides that, if it's important, he'll tell her when he's ready.

He needs his own workspace though, out of the way of Bridget's paying work. So, down at the end of the garden, where a little stream runs, he turns the old, run-down potting shed into a makeshift forge. For hours each day, he disappears in there.

She wakes, one morning in the false dawn of the early morning, to find herself alone. He does this occasionally, going out walking while the ground is still covered in its blanket of mists; his restlessness needing an outlet. But she hears a strange noise, rhythmic and sharp in the cool air. So she wraps her dressing gown around her, puts the kettle on, and goes off, over the field that is their back garden. The TARDIS, against the back wall of the house, is silent and empty, so she goes on. Finally, down on the stream on the far edge of the garden, she identifies the source of the sound, from the little shed that she never paid much attention to, before now.

He's just taken something out of the little fire that's hot enough to warm the entire space. Rose comes in cautiously, watching the sparks fly up from the hammer blows. As she watches, he makes some mistake, apparent by his incomprehensible swearing. He looks up, noticing her and stopping dead. "Oh, um," he looks away, at the scene she's walked into, "hi."

Rose enters properly, and he goes into action, turning down the gas of the forge and taking the cherry-red metal with the tongs into the trough of water, where it lays, hissing. Soon, the forge is quiet, the heat slowly escaping into the cool air. "What are you making?"

"Oh, nothing really. Just messing around a bit," he replies, not really answering.

She steps forward, asking again. He doesn't look at her when he speaks. "Nothing important. Just something pretty perhaps, I was thinking it could be, I dunno, trinket or something."

She doesn't ask again, but the question hangs in the air between them. His expression, his mask, slips just a little. He shakes his head, turns away, because Rose knows what's going on. "We didn't have the parts," she says quietly, an echo from the past.

He nods, and she gets it. He's trying to make the parts they need; parts that won't be invented for a couple of hundred years, at the least on this planet, if at all. There's something else that she realizes, something that needs to be said. "It isn't going to work, is it?"

The Doctor doesn't have to answer, because they both know she's right. She's staring at his back, because he won't face her and she won't force him to. She asks the question that's been chasing her, for a while now. "Is this my fault?"

Puzzlement finally gets him to glance at her. "What do you mean?"

She realizes that the question is confusing, and rephrases. "Why are you doing this? Not the metal," she waves a hand, encompassing the little workshop, "but the house. The living a life, day after day. Are you doing this because of me?"

He turns the question back around on her. "Why do you leave when I do? Why don't you stay?"

She blinks, thinking about it. "I told you, when," she stops, "when they left; that I wasn't going to leave you."

That's not good enough for him. "But that was when I could show you the universe, every planet in the cosmos. Anywhere in the whole of time and space. When the TARDIS worked properly," he adds quietly.

"You think I stayed for the stars?" She asks.

And there it is; the thing that's been there all along. He turns to face her, full on. "Are you ever going to leave me?" His tone is neutral, as if he has no opinion on the matter; still trying to keep that mask.

She tilts her head, watching him, waiting for the facade to crack again, wanting to get under there. "Do you want me to?"

The Doctor can't answer that, he just can't. It'd be against the rules, to tell her the truth, to tell her that, other than a crippled TARDIS, she's all he has left. That, if she left, he'd go on, of course, but there would always be a part of him with her. And even that's against the rules, he realizes. He's loved every companion that he's had, all of them the same. But Rose, Rose has wormed her way into his very being, become so much a part of him, more than any other.

"Do you want me to leave?" She asks again. "Because, if you do," she hesitates, weighing the truth of her statement, "I would. If that's what you wanted."

He doesn't give her a straight answer, not that she's exactly expecting one. "Do they matter anymore? All those rules and codes that I scorned for so many years." She realizes he's talking about Gallifrey, and keeps silent. "Does it really matter now?"

She doesn't have an answer for him, and he keeps talking. "There were rules I followed, you know," he tells her, gazing at something so far beyond this place she can barely comprehend. "I was a renegade, a rule breaker," he says, without the pride that once would have been there, "in everything but this." He looks back down at her.

Somehow, without either of them noticing the exact moment, he isn't hiding anymore, not from her. "I don't want you to leave. But someday, you're going to want to. When that day comes- I don't want to keep you where you don't want to be."

She scoffs a little. "Yeah, but what have I got to go back to?"

Because she doesn't have a family to go home to anymore. The Doctor flinches, because he feels that her decision is his fault. "And that's what I chose," she says, just a little sadly.

He wants to ask her if she thinks she made the right choice, but he's afraid. He can face down demons and Daleks and anything the universe can throw at him. But he's not brave enough to ask her that question. He doesn't take this chance, though the dialogue is one that never really goes away between the two of them. Rose turns. "I put the kettle on for tea," she says simply.

The Doctor nods, letting go of the previous thread of conversation. They have tea, at four in the morning, and watch the sun rise in a slow creep of light across the land. It's too early for Rose still, so she goes back to bed.

The second time she wakes up that day, later on, she's still alone, but his voice is drifting up from the bottom floor. He's on the phone, with a patient, she decides, as she lays there and listens. And so it goes. Some mornings she finds him in the forge, others he is elsewhere, puttering around the kitchen, or out in the fields. Only occasionally does she wake to find him beside her, where he was when she fell asleep.

Ireland, in addition to the sheep and grass, is also a land of dreams and legends. The land remembers the history better than most lands, more viscerally. Other lands forget because they must, but this one doesn't. Leprechauns, gods, saints; all of them are echoes of other things, other truths; all of which the land remembers. They run into so many strange things here in Ireland, almost as many as they did while traveling more widely. All things accepted as just a normal part of life by the locals.

But for the most part, out here in the pastoral lands that roll away before the eye to the crashing seas and rocks of the Wicklow area, they live an almost quiet life for a year or so. People, when they are spread so thinly over such a wide area, become naturally neighbourly. They spend New Year's Eve that year at the pub in town, toasting in the year surrounded by people who call themselves friends, as the snow falls faintly over the countryside.

222

She's said the goodbyes, and given what explanations she can (though they're mostly excuses, since she doesn't really understand either why they're moving), while he's got the TARDIS ready to go again. Not far, still, he still can't fix it. But they're off again, the Doctor's wanderlust getting to him too much again. The house, which they were only borrowing for a little while anyway from one of the many someones who owed him a favour or two, is locked and silent again, as Rose steps from the gravel of the garden walk in through the doors of the TARDIS once more.


	3. Part Three: New York, United States

"Where are we?"

Her gray jumper blends in with the surrounding trees, bare of leaves, and the cold air turns her cheeks and nose and fingertips bright red. It's just beginning to snow here, as twilight falls over the forest they have emerged into.

He sucks in his cheeks, calculating. "Ooo, about a quarter of a mile from Fifth Avenue," he says and points over the trees to the top edges of the buildings visible from here, as she smiles.

The thing about New York City, the one on Earth, at least, is that very few people actually belong there. Everyone else is just passing through. Some people are born here, and may even stay all their lives. More often than not, people born there leave, and their places are taken by others coming through to stay for a while.

There are all sorts of reason that people come here; to find yourself; to find someone else; to hide; to make it; to break the glass ceiling; a million threads, on one tiny island.

The TARDIS is in the southern end of a little valley called the Dene, in the park, not really hidden in the surrounding Kwanzan cherry trees, crabapples, and magnolias. It's pretty obviously visible from the shelter atop the rock, and blue is not exactly the best colour for camouflage, but no one questions its presence.

Rose will go out sometimes, bundled against the cold gripping the city that winter, and leave the Doctor to his wearisome puzzle of a machine. She comes back hours later, happy and chattering. Other times, when he gets too aggravated with something, she'll make him go do something else, preferably outside of these walls.

As usual, down in the open underbelly of the console, is the Doctor, when Rose comes in from the cold. Wedged beneath the control panel and surrounded by wires and lifted grating, the grease and ruffled hair and frustration all build up, as she watches him silently. "Doctor," she says finally, trying to gauge the right moment to speak. Too soon and he won't want to give up yet.

Apparently this time she's spoken too late. He shoves himself out from his mess, uttering a wordless cry of frustration and violently throwing the sonic screwdriver across the large room. It hits the far wall with a clang, and she works to keep from flinching. She only fails a little.

He approaches, standing before her, staring at her wordlessly. There so much going on, just behind his eyes, that she almost wishes that he would yell, cry, lash out, something to get it out into the open. Instead, he turns away, kicking the base of the railing. This time she doesn't flinch. Leaning heavily on the abused railing, he tries to compose himself. Her voice betrays her with a tremor, when she calls to him again. He looks at her, and she can see the poorly veiled fear in his eyes before he ducks his face away again.

Rose steps up to him slowly, carefully. Taking his face in her hands, she swipes a thumb across a grease stain on his cheek. He stares down at her as she touches another smudge on his forehead. His eyes make her stop, and she has no time to react before he's grabbed her, pulling her tight against him.

They stay like that for a short eternity, their heartbeats melding into one endless cascade of life that she can feel with her hand caught between their chests. When her brain kicks back in, she realizes that she's been expecting him to pull away any moment now to go back to his work. She also realizes that, in the back of her head, she's been plotting ways to get him out of here for a bit, when he does do that.

He surprises her. He pulls away, but then pulls her along with him by the hand, and not in the direction of the console either. Leading her through the corridors, there's the barest hint of a grin on his mouth. "Go get dressed," he tells her.

She can tell that he thinks he's come up with something good, so she plays along, looking down at what she's wearing now. "What," she asks cheekily, "jeans not doing it for you anymore?"

He's still not really grinning, but they're getting there as an eyebrow quirks up. "Well, they're great yeah, and you could probably pull anything off; but not really for a night out on the town."

He wonders if she knows what she does to him with that grin of hers. Probably not, he decides. "Really?"

"Yep. Anything you want to do Rose Tyler. On me."

She scoffs at him, jolly. "Sure, it sounds great, Mr. Man-with-no-money."

Shaking his head, he shoos her off down the hall towards their room. "You let me worry about that."

Finally, as she dances off down the corridor, he smiles.

333

They fight. They don't remember what it was about in the first place, and soon it doesn't matter. They're shouting at one another across the room, when she suddenly goes still and silent, with narrowed eyes. Turning on her heel, she disappears out of the door. The Doctor waits for a few minutes, letting her cool down. But when he steps into the wet spring air, she's nowhere near.

An hour or two later, when she doesn't come back, he checks to make sure that she's taken her cell phone with her, and calls Mio, the friend that he guess she's staying with. Wherever they have ended up for any length of time, Rose gathers people about her in networks, and for once he's glad of it. His call is bounced from friend to friend to one that finally confirms that, yes, Rose did show up, and no, she has no desire to speak with him.

He tells himself that this is fine with him, and that she'll be okay without him. Throwing himself into futile work again, he tries to avoid thinking about her. For a while it works, and just as he feels he's about to go mad with the not-thinking, three days later, the Ice Warriors invade New York.

As improbable as it is on an ice-clad island of over a million panicked humans, they run into each other, almost literally, on the street. They run. And after they've faced the invaders, and the Doctor has challenged them and defeated them, she is left sitting on a park bench in the leafy oasis of the siren-loud city.

He doesn't press her to rescind her decision. He just turns and walks away from her, neither of them saying a word. Later that night, he asks her what she would have done if she hadn't come back. She doesn't have an answer anymore.

333

The door slams, and Rose jumps. "There you are," she says. She watches him as he doesn't respond, as he runs around, pulling levers and poking buttons and staring at the scanner. "What are you doing?" She asks, knowing he doesn't do this sort of runaround for no reason, and hoping for something exciting.

"You should get your things together," he tells her, hands flying about as he calculates and punches in numbers and long, circular phrases in his flowing script. "We're going."

Instead of dashing off as he's suggested, she folds her arms across her chest. "Why are we doing that?"

Frustrated, he runs his hand through his hair, not for the first time, because it's sticking out in a hundred different directions. "Does it matter?" Then he's off again, bouncing around the console.

Somewhere in between muttering about plugs and vortices and polarised neutron flows, he notices that Rose is still standing in the same place. He looks at her expectantly. "Well?"

She's angry though; he can tell by her body language, and her tone of voice confirms this. "Doctor," she says, her voice with an edge of cold to it, "Why are we leaving?"

Six and a half months, they'd been here, not all that long, and she's not ready to leave just yet. The Doctor steps away from the console, towards her. He thinks he's worked out the situation in his head, and knows he should tread carefully, though he won't if he doesn't feel like it. "I have to leave, I can't be here."

"Why not?"

She's not going to leave this alone. He runs a hand through his hair again. "Because I'm going to be here sometime soon; and two Doctors in one place can be bad," he nods, "as you've seen. So we need to go before I show up."

She works this out silently. "How do you know?" She asks to clarify.

He taps his temple. "Time Lord thing. Like a premonition, sort of. Now come on." He goes back to his work, expecting her to accept this answer, as to him it's perfectly reasonable.

She stands there silently for a moment more before protesting. "No."

Looking out around the console in astonishment, he asks, "No? What do you mean 'no'?"

There are so many things running through her mind, and she just picks the first thing that she can put into words at that moment. "You said i you /i can't be here."

"Hm?" He's impatient, but she won't budge until she's satisfied.

"You said that you can't be here. What about me?"

He's become very still, looking around the console until he thinks he's hidden his fear deep enough to not be seen, "Do you want to stay then, when I go?" He asks slowly.

For the briefest moment, she considers saying yes, just to get something from him. But after the moment passes, she shakes her head. "No," she answers softly. Then, with more strength and the smallest hint of desperation, "No. But if I'm going to be dragged around like a human pull-toy, then I want to know why."

"Why what?" He questions back at her, his voice as loud as hers.

He's about to point out that being with him is her choice, and if she doesn't like the way she's apparently being 'dragged around' then she can't leave right now, if she wants. But she beats him to it with a lateral jump. "Why did we leave Ireland?"

He's caught off guard, staring at her and trying to come up with a way to avoid responding. Silently, he turns away, adjusting more controls, though there's not much left to do. Rose is getting impatient. "Why did we leave?" It comes out as a near shout, and even she's surprised at her forcefulness. She supposes that maybe she's not dealing with this whole situation as well as she thought.

"Why does it matter?" He yells back, not nearly as loud as her. Apparently, he's not doing as well as she thought either.

Rose stares at him. "We were just settling in; we were making friends; we were-."

He cuts her off, quite rudely. "Would it have been better in five years? Ten maybe? Hm? When you're all settled in and all your friends knew you and wanted you around? Better to leave when we did then-."

She returns the favour and cuts him off by talking over him. "But you, you're like a bad landlord! Everything's fine and then one day it's 'oops, here's your 30 day notice. Sorry 'bout that!'"

He realizes she isn't going to stop unless he gives her the real reason. So, in a leap of courage and, quite possibly, he thinks, stupidity, he does. "It felt too much like home," he says clearly instead of loudly, his frank words cutting off her Jackie-esque rant.

Instantly, all sorts of responses jump to her tongue, involving clichés about hearts and hearths and hats, but some part of her tells her that this is something with more meaning than those. So she waits for him to speak again. When he doesn't, she prompts him with a softly-spoken, "What do you mean?"

Now they're stumbling into territory as yet uncharted between the two of them. She can tell by the little way his shoulders fall, and the slight downturn of his mouth as he leans heavily against the console. "Ireland is such a thin place," he says, taking his usual roundabout way of answering. "The walls between worlds, the barriers between myth, belief, reality, are all so blurred." He looks up at the column, still for now. "When I was young," he says, quietly, "on my planet, so many years of power had worn things thin. Especially where I lived. You could feel it up there. And it affected the world around it. For example, there was this hermit who-." Though he had been picking up steam, he stops, the truth that they're all gone hits him again. He gathers himself. "The world-walls were too thin," he finishes, staring down at his hands, resting on the controls.

Rose absorbs all of this silently. Then she asks softly, because she's curious and has never had occasion to ask before, "What was its name? Your planet?"

For a long moment, she doesn't think that he's going to answer her. Facing away from her, in a whisper, she barely hears. "Gallifrey. I'm from Gallifrey."

Said like that, so softly, filled with loss and longing and guilt and regret, and all of the other things he'll never show to her, it sounds like a prayer, though to what or whom she has no idea. He sets his hands in motion once more, adjusts another control on the dash. "You probably have some business to finish with before we leave." It's not a suggestion.

She hesitates, but nods finally, and slowly walks to the doors and out into the muggy night air of early summer. Above the surrounding trees, all in full summer leaf, the sky hangs silently. Any stars, even the brightest ones, are blotted out by the glow of the sodium-vapour streetlights. Bouncing off every surface, including the bottoms of the few scattered clouds, they give the blank sky an orange hue. Rose breaths out as she whispers the name, just the once, to the invisible stars, and walks away.


	4. Part Four: Perth, Australia

A/N: Sorry about the last chapter guys. I didn't realize my partitions weren't showing up. But they are now, so this part and the last part may make a little more sense. Thank you to all my reviewers so far: you guys are excellent! After this, there's going to be one more part. Enjoy!

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The little house belonged to an old eccentric he once knew, he tells her. He doesn't tell her that the reason he was so eccentric was that he was, in fact, a Time lord who retired to Earth. He doesn't tell her that he saw the old man die in the wars. He doesn't tell her of his part in the man's death. The house is small, and old, and hasn't been kept, except by an old neighbour lady once a month, since he left. In this timeline, apparently, that's somewhere between six and thirteen years. No one remembers exactly, mostly because time is skewed because of his presence and subsequent absence.

It's in that strange place between two of the towns that make up Perth. The city is a bit like every other large city in the world—it sort of grew up around itself, the crush of people compressing and then expanding once again to fill the space. But with so few people in this part of the world, in such a large area, that space isn't entirely filled. So, halfway down the road to Rockingham is the cottage.

Rose finds a couple of old bikes in the potting shed, and convinces him to fix them up so that they can ride to town and down to the beach. The sound of waves permeates that house, like it's crept into the very woodwork, getting itself down into the crevices.

Maria, one of the neighbour ladies, mentions that the day-care is looking for another volunteer, as they don't have the money to hire someone else. Over tea, Rose mentions it to the Doctor. He obviously thinks that this is a great idea, and clearly expresses his enthusiasm for it by spinning her about the tiny kitchen, singing 'Waltzing Matilda' (for no apparent reason other than they're in Australia and he's happy) at the top of his lungs. He makes up ridiculous verses until she can't breathe for laughing.

That night, she mulls it over in her mind and considers something that she hadn't before now. She doesn't need to ask if he's awake, as he almost always is. "Why're you so enthusiastic about me taking this job?"

"Oh, you know, doing a good thing, giving back to the community, helping out the world…" he trails off, not wanting to lie when she knows he is. Not that the things he's named aren't good reasons. They're just not the only ones, or the most important.

Rose sighs into the darkness, tired. "Is it because you'd know I'd be alright? If I chose to stay?"

In the darkness, he doesn't answer for a long time. When he does, it's with a sigh, echoing hers. "It's because you would be alright no matter what happens to me." He doesn't tell her that he thinks that it's beautiful, and amazing, what she does: leading this double life in a way that doesn't break her in two.

444

She throws her hands down in exasperation. "You represent nothing. You've no planet, no people, no proper name even. Your machine doesn't work. All you have are two meaningless titles: Doctor, and Time Lord."

"Well we can't all be named after flowers, can we? And, Lord of Time? That's pretty impressive, especially since I'm the only one."

"That's exactly it: you're the only one. You can't rule a domain all by yourself. And there are others that have taken it over, aren't there? The Time Agents and stuff, like Jack was." He flinches at the mention of his name. "And besides that-," Stopping in mid-sentence, she wrings the empty air with clenched hands, not coming up with the words to express her frustrations with him. "You! You aggravate me, and frustrate me, and I love you," she tells him.

"I love you," she repeats. And it's not dignified, with her nose running, and her eyes red. But it's beautiful enough to nearly crack his hearts, as if she hadn't broken them long ago.

He stares at her, not bothering after all of these years, to veil the sadness he knows he should hide. "Quite right too."

He knows that she's waiting for it. For the reciprocation and echo of the sentiments, expressed in words. He cannot give to her what he longs to. She looks away, at the wall, anywhere but the gaze telling her what she cannot hear. Finally, he feels he must explain himself, or lose her, like sand slipping from his grasp. "I can't, Rose."

She looks back up at him, eyes hinting of stone. "Can't what?"

Stepping closer to her, tempting the beast, he answers. "I can't say what you want me to."

There, the flash of flint as she hardens her mouth. "Why not?" Before he speaks, she wrenches herself away from him. "Because I'm the same as the rest. You can't say it because it wouldn't be true."

She's about to sweep out of here, and the desperation reflects in his voice, just for a syllable. "No."

Rose stops. Doesn't, won't turn around. Lets him speak his piece, with no guarantee that she'll stay if she doesn't like it. He steps, once, twice, getting his voice back under his control and finding that it's slipping, just when he fears it the most. "I can't say what you want me to,' he repeats, softly, "not because it wouldn't be true, but because it would."

She turns, a frown on her lips. "I don't-."

"Men promise so many things in the pursuit of women. That they would save the world for them, that they would save the universe for them, or destroy it, all for them, if only she said the word. But the thing is, for me, it could be true. To say that, and mean it? Would be to say that I would do anything for you. And that can't happen, because I would have the ability to." He's trying so hard to explain all of this, the one rule that made sense to him, and the strain is showing in his voice, cracking it. "Do you understand?"

She doesn't like it, but she accepts it, he sees briefly as she looks towards the door again. "Anything?" She murmurs.

His breath catches, because he's told her the truth of it, and he very well can't take it all back now. She nods, turns to him, and gives him a little smile as she slips into his arms to give him a hug. Trying to reassure him that she isn't going. Part of him feels she's already gone. "I wouldn't ask you to," she murmurs.

He thinks, one day, she will.

444

She teaches him the old songs of her childhood, remembering them. Pulling them from the depths at the back of her mind and into the light, so that she can give them to the children at the day-care. He doesn't teach her his songs, because she knows them already, somehow, singing them in her mind as she sleeps. She tries teaching him hand games, and counting games, and he never seems to quite get it right, but that's all right.

They don't know how it happens, but she's found that she has a life without him. That, if he left, she would be able to bear it. Yes, it would break her heart, and she would want him back desperately. But her life would go on. She would go out, and she would teach the children, and laugh with them, and sing the nursery rhymes, and come back home. Well, not home, just the house (because he wouldn't be there).

Instead of finding a harmony to him, she's found a melody. Two separate melodies can't work, they'll only get tangled and confused and jangled. So the melody needs to become a harmony, one or the other of them. Perhaps they both need to change.

They realize that if they change too much, they'll leave each other behind, or the separate lives they hold will cease to intersect. To adapt, to converge, is so hard, and it's always about so much more than it seems.

444

"What happens next?" she wonders aloud, still scared, but he doesn't know what of. "When the TARDIS is fixed and can leave this planet and this time." She hesitates. "Is there going to be an 'us'?"

He takes her hand, twining their fingers together like past days, when they would run. "As long as you want to be by my side, I will be with you."

Rose shakes her head. "But I'm gonna get old, and weak. And one day you won't want me anymore."

"Never," he says in mock outrage, before humming a bar or two from 'When I'm Sixty-Four'.

444

She speaks, and he listens, the storm outside rumbling underneath her words. "You know, when I was little, I was never afraid of thunderstorms."

Watching the large, heavy droplets slapping heavily into the hot dirt outside in the garden, lush and green in the summer heat, he doesn't respond. Rose speaks over the booms of thunder. "Just the opposite really. I would wait all summer for one of the big ones, which are pretty rare in London," she reminds him.

He shifts, skin cool to the touch even in this oppressive heat. "But when they happen, they're impressive," he says quietly.

But this is her story, and she accepts his statement with only a dip of her chin. "When they would forecast for one, I'd go outside. Watch it coming towards us. Mum always thought I was gonna get frazzled." There's a smile in her voice. She's remembering, not grieving. Not after all these years.

Rose tells him, while they lie together, sheltered from the storm outside as it breaks, of coming inside, all blue lips and shivering limbs. Freezing cold and soaking wet, but alive, so alive, because she's ridden the storm. She's survived.

444

They stand there at the edge, watching the endless dance of the ocean and feeling the earth turn below their feet, pulling at them. Except she knows how this dance ends, because she's seen it. They know how it began, and saw that too. But what matters, here and now, is that the dance is still going on, not caring and not thinking about how this ends.

She sees the world as if it is laid out before her, on the sand. She knows, for all the great things they've done together, that this is what it boils down to in the end: taking what you're given and making a life, not just an existence, out of it. Someday things may be different, but here and now, things simply are.

Slowly, he reaches out a hand to her, staring out at the water. He doesn't need to look at her to ask the silent question. As the rain comes hissing across the water towards them, Rose takes his hand, laces her fingers with his, and smiles as the rain falls down on their upturned faces.

444

He watches her as she sleeps. Pink skin and gold hair stand out against the dark blue of the sheets. She's taking up more than half of the bed, and hogging the covers as well. Her belly, just beginning to round out, swells the sea of the covers, and he thinks he can catch the sound of the new little life if he holds his breath and is very, very still.

It's enough to keep him tied to the spot for a little longer than he might otherwise. Until she leaves to go and come back, or he takes himself away to keep from staying.

444

"Rose?"

She sighs, closes the book but keeping a finger at her page, waiting for the second time. Because if he says her name twice it means he hasn't changed his mind. When he calls for her again she levers herself off the ratty corduroy couch with a sigh, tossing the book to the couch with a thump and a sigh of tired furniture springs. "I'm coming, hold on."

Even before she steps through the door, she knows why he's called her. She can feel it in the air, almost like electricity in water; as she breathes in a gasp of air, she can even feel it in her lungs, filling her up again. The TARDIS is better.

He looks up at her as she wanders inside finally, and smiles. "I did it. Well, there's a few more repairs that'll have to happen before she's well and truly better. But…" He trails off at the look on her face.

"It's been so long. I'd- I'd almost forgotten." She says, breathing in.

He looks at her curiously. "Forgotten what?" He asks, softly.

"What it felt like to be…" But she doesn't know how to describe it, closing her eyes. "To be so surrounded by…time? Is that all this is?" She asks, opening her eyes.

Taking a hand, he lifts it up, pressing their palms together. "You know what they told you when you were a child? When you believed it could all be true. Maybe, just maybe, the world can be all that you believed it was. And the world is stranger than you ever dreamed it, here in this place, where time doesn't follow any rules but mine." He reminds her, weaving them with words back into the spell it always was, disguised and hidden by jokes and poor driving and long coats.

They stand there, and she can't breathe, and doesn't and doesn't feel like she needs to, until, all at once, it comes out as a gasp of laughter, bringing tears hard on the edge of it. "You did it!"

"Yep."

And there it is again: That feeling of teetering on the edge of some precipice. A familiar one, but it still manages to set her heart racing at the thought of flying off on wings of time and light rather than feathers and wax. He steps back from her, leaving a space as big as themselves between them, smiles at her, and says, "Do you want to come with me?"


	5. Part Five: Arcadia

We survive. The hard way, the easy way, it doesn't matter. Sometimes the only way. The ways that teach us lessons so we can survive again and again, each time. We survive. And we learn.

aaa

The monument is not the only one of its kind, as many planets across the galaxy were touched by the Time Wars. Some are dedicated to one side or the other and some claim to be neutral. This one's certainly not the biggest, or the most important one. It's on a little backwater planet that, at one point, was a stronghold of the Time Lords. It wasn't the first to fall, nor the last, but somewhere at the beginning of the end.

His coat fluttering in the breeze, the Doctor stands alone, staring at the column of gray, unadorned stone, with the simple inscription "In memory". No more is needed. Anyone who would come here would know exactly what had happened, or wouldn't care.

He speaks, and does not know why. Stupid to talk to ghosts of memories, he knows. And yet, he speaks. "I'm sorry I didn't come here sooner."

"We have a son. A year old now."

He turns away in frustration, running a hand through his hair. It's not as if they can hear him. He kicks at a stone, and watches it as it goes bouncing away along the empty plain, devoid of life. Calming, he turns back around, staring at the dirt beneath his dusty Converse.

aaa

"I don't know what to do, Rose." It's a confession that's hard to make. With this soft body against his chest, and the baby's face, looking very much indeed like a miniature Winston Churchill, but endearing despite all reason, it's the truest thing he can say.

She snorts indelicately, rolls her eyes at him. "You think I do?"

He smiles, but only briefly. When he opens his mouth to continue, she cuts him off, knowing that this is about more than which way up to hold the child. "We'll manage. We always have."

aaa

He leaves the singing of lullabies to Rose. Instead, when Rose makes him go in her place to calm the boy down, the Doctor reads aloud. Anything from children's books to temporal physics, to "the Year's Best Science-Fiction from 1967", all pulled at random from the TARDIS library.

aaa

_"I'd like to get away from Earth for a while  
__And then comes back to it and begin again.  
__May no fate willfully misunderstand me  
__And half grant what I wish and snatch me away  
__Not to return. Earth's the right place for love  
__I'd don't know where it's likely to go better."_

aaa

He stops, closes the book, smiling down at the crib, contemplating this strange life he's found himself in, watching the boy, sleeping and dreaming of birches he's never seen.

Rose watches them, and then it comes to her, out of some half forgotten memory from so many lifetimes ago. "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches," she says, smiling as he whips around, caught, smiling his puckish grin.

aaa

It's not about the street you grew up on. Or rather, it is, but not the things like the cross street or how far away something else is. It's the little, insignificant things, the doorstep you sat on after school, the people you ran with in your childhood gang, the way the street smelled after a good hard rain, the way the branches bent as they swung down. The things that are hardest to learn.

The little things make us what we were. And what we substitute when we do not have those things

aaa

"I'm scared."

"I'm scared I'm going to lose her. I'm scared of what would happen to me."

"I don't think I could stand to lose her."

aaa

For the first few years, just because it's practical and it's worked so far. They spend a few years in the suns of Cairo, until Alex is as brown as the other children he grows up with. A few years later, and they move on. Always moving on, always finding a new place to be.

Andrecia, 5975; Venice, 1923; Portland, Oregon, 1957; Each place, only a few years, and back and forth in time now. Simply because they can. For the sheer joy of it.

aaa

"I'm scare I might lose him too. And that might be even worse. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. A descendent. A son. Something so precious. How I can bear it? How can I bear the weight of knowing that I cannot always protect him? That to put him in a glass case where no harm would come to him would be just as bad.

"Ironically enough, I learned that from you, didn't I?

"Stay long enough, and you begin to smother yourselves to death.

"I'm not going to be like you.

"I have a son."

aaa

Rose watches him from the doorway, the TARDIS make reassuring humming noises behind her back. She doesn't know whether it's for her sake, or for the child strapped in his cloth to her back, or for the one who can't hear it from where he is, so far out.

Finally curiosity, one of those crazy human impulses that will always get the better of her, cannot be sated, and she strikes out across the dusty, windswept plain towards the still figure standing alone.

aaa

"I love her."

"I love them both.

"And maybe that's dangerous, and maybe that's against some kind of law.

"I don't care anymore."

aaa

This isn't what it should be, and it isn't what it's supposed to be, and that's never mattered. You fumble along, doing the best that you can. Some days you feel elated, perhaps happier than you've ever been before. Other days, the little annoyances and struggles of life, every one of the myriad lives you live, catch up to you and overwhelm you so.

aaa

Rose is twice as angry as he is, probably. If she was any less of what she is, she be shaking and screaming and pleading. But, as the Doctor bargains between her life, and Alex's and the planets, she's keeping her face so still, so perfect. As if her and her son being held hostage for the ransom of a galaxy is nothing to her.

"Come now, Doctor. Such a pretty little thing. And so very young. Surely she's worth something to you."

He won't respond, doesn't trust himself really. Besides, this is not the proper time to speak.

"Or perhaps," the man-shaped creature says with a nasty grin, "they're a nuisance you'd rather be rid of?"

It takes all he's made of not to shudder at that. He doesn't look at the terror in Rose's eyes that he taught her to conceal on her face. He doesn't think he could manage that.

His brain moves and the hasty plan is carried out and, as the explosions die away, Rose clings to the baby and cries, big shivering heaves. He simply holds her.

aaa

"Is it worth it?"

She looks up from the mug of tea and the crossword puzzle. "What?"

"I keep thinking, that maybe," he stops, can't go on, because he knows where this argument, that's exactly what it is, goes. Where it's gone every time.

Rose sets down the pencil very carefully. "Maybe what?" He's started this, she isn't going to let him stop.

He sighs, goes on, not really wanting to. "That maybe it'd be better if you and Alex were somewhere…safer."

"Doctor," she begins, ready to start in on all of the reasons why and why not, the examples of how he's tried it before. He stops her.

"You nearly died today. Both of you."

She tilts her head studying him. "You think I don't know that? You think I'm not scared of what could happen next? I could lose him at any moment. Any moment. And not to things like monsters and plots, but to everyday life. You think that doesn't scare me too?"

"But wouldn't it be better where you didn't have to deal with people trying to kill you everyday?" He asks, pleading his case.

"Do you think they'd leave us alone? 'Oh, that Rose Tyler's stopped traveling with the Doctor, she's of no further use to us'? You don't think they wouldn't hesitate to fly across the galaxy just to use me as a threat against you?"

He doesn't answer, looking down. Rose picks the pencil back up and moves on to the next crossword clue. "It's worth it," she tells him simply.

aaa

You can't lock someone away, just because you want to keep them safe. You'll only end up killing them anyway. Not that it doesn't hurt, watching them go and live, knowing that one day they won't. That something will happen, because something always happens, that's just their life.

That one day all of this will end and the universe will die out or fade away. Entropy runs, and you can't stop it, even for a moment. That's what makes the living of it, even living for so long a time, so painful.

And so, so beautiful.

aaa

"No, that's not precisely true, really."

"Because I have a reason for wanting the universe to be better than it is now."

"A _reason._"

"And that's what laws are for, really, aren't they?"

"You just have to know when to break those laws."

aaa

Her rubber soles throw up small puffs of dust as she approaches. Alex is sheltered from the breeze by the upturned edge of the blanket, sleeping soundly. There's a moment of stillness, as she stops, and he knows she's there but doesn't turn. Not just yet.

She's not here to say anything. Just to let him know that she's alright, that she's there. He looks at her, nods his thanks, and she turns to walk back. He looks at the monolithic monument once more.

There are so many things that cannot be said, even if he had forever to do so in. And this talking into the air is stupid, but that's fine with him. He's done stupid things before.

"I have a son."

Then, just as he's turning to follow Rose's footprints home, he pauses. "I'm sorry I didn't come here sooner."

His footsteps are taken by the wind and thrown, along with the sound of the TARDIS, into the vast, empty plain, leaving it empty once more.

aaa

We can never go back. Not to the way were once were. And so we move forward. Always forward, putting one foot in front of the other, into infinity.

aaa

a/n: This is it. Part Five. The end. I had a whole heckuva time naming this part. Anyone interested can ask. And, oh yes. This whole fic was inspired by a challenge to write an AU in a place you'd never been before (though I've been to New York twice, years ago). All of the place descriptions were based off what info I could find on Wikipedia, Google Earth, and (oddly enough) a friend who happened to grow up in Bray and another who lives outside Perth. Funny how that works.

Thank you to anyone who reviewed, or even just read, this story. You guys are part of what makes fandom worth it. Thank you to my readers on LJ, and my BRs for not letting me drive them batty. Love to you all.

Disclaimer: Five parts later, and I still don't own doctor Who. That would be the BBC and such people.

The poem in the story is called _Birches_, by Robert Frost.

aaa


End file.
